Monterey Bay Panorama
Here are some examples of what I spend (waste?) my spare time with.

Flight

One of my life-long interests is flying. I got half-way to getting my private pilot certificate while in grad school, but was interrupted by 9/11 and the grad student funding situation... (Incidentally, if you are interested in flying, both from a physics and a pilot perspective, check out the online book See How It Flies.) Computer flight simulators are a geekier but much more cost-effective alternative to real flying.

Back in college I discovered Warbirds, a World War II combat flight simulator and one of the first massively multiplayer online games. It had a for the time very realistic flight and gunnery model (see for example this page), and featured large-scale scenarios where hundreds of players took part in elaborate preplanned operations like bomb raids over Germany. (I made some pages highlighting operations that I flew and planned with the Royal Swedish Airforce online squad back then.) When RSI hit me in 1998, I had to stop and the game is long since gone.

The spiritual follower to Warbirds is World War II Online, started in 1999 by a bunch of people that worked on Warbirds and still going strong today! This makes it one of the longest-running online multiplayer games. This is much more than a combat flight simulator, it's an online combined arms persistent battlefield where you can play infantry, anti-aircraft guns, tanks, destroyers, or aircraft and know that everything around also is controlled by a living, breathing human being somewhere in the world. While the graphics may not be as nice as other small-scale combat games, it is fiercely realistic in its modeling of flight model, gunnery, ballistics and damage. It's also home to some very dedicated online squads, and for a time I played with Kampfgruppe Wiking online squad. The only problem is that it takes so much time to get good...

Below is a video showing a massive drop of paratroopers that I captured a couple of years ago:

I also played around with OpenAL and the EFX effects extension to see how the sounds from WWIIOL could be made more realistic by mimicking the atmospheric attenuation of sounds at long distances. To test if this works on different hardware, I made a little downloadable demo. Give it a try if you want.

When it comes to flight simulators that aren't about shooting people down, the field seems to have gone down the drain. Now when multi-monitor setups is becoming affordable and there would be potential for making really realistic simulators, they aren't being made anymore. Microsoft shut down the MS Flight Simulator team in 2009 after more than 20 years of dominating the field, and now there's basically only X-Plane left. Maybe the genre became a victim of the increasing cost of developing entertainment software; apparently it's a small enough market that it's not worth people's money to invest in -- there's more money to be made by making another twitch shooter! So much for those that say a free market maximizes choice...

Silent Computing

Ever since my computers started having fans (that would be the Amiga 2000 I got back in 1989), the fan noise has been bothering me. It took a while before I realized it doesn't have to be that way and that there are more effective ways to silence the machine than throwing blankets over it... The site Silent PC Review is a treasure chest full of valuable tips and equipment recommendations. Currently my desktop machine is a largely home-cooked water cooled Antec P180 case, with a solid-state drive for the system and a rubber-suspended 500GB drive for data. The fans are controlled with a home-written PID controller through a Matrix Orbital LCD screen, reading temperatures at multiple locations using Dallas DS18S20 temperature sensors. It's very quiet, though the amazing dynamic range of the human ear means that every time you kill a source of noise, another one becomes dominant and soon sounds just as loud... It's light years away from the A2000 though, and it was a lot of fun (and work) to set up.